5 Designer Hacks That Make Your Home Look Expensive Without Buying New Furniture

The biggest mistake I see people make when they try to elevate their home is that they focus on what they can buy instead of on what they can hack. Today I've partnered with QVC to share some invisible designer hacks that are going to instantly make your home look and feel more luxurious, but you're going to do so easily and affordably. And I promise you, these are ones you've never heard before. Starting with hack number one, I want you to mess with your color palette. Now I don't want you to go out and paint your home rainbow because that's a lot of effort. That's costly. That's not what we're doing. Instead, I just want you to mess with your 60-30-10 rule. If you're not familiar with this rule, 60% of items in one room should be one color, 30% should be a secondary color, and then 10% should be an accent color. Option number one is to just switch out that accent color. So you can spray paint items you already have. You can shop your own home for a different accent color and use that one in that room and kind of switch the color in a different room. You can go and find really affordable decorative accents to fill that 10% because the 10% is such a small percentage that it's going to be a lot more affordable to switch those items around. Alternatively, you can just switch the assignments of the 60-30-10. So maybe right now your 60 is brown, but then we can make brown 10 and kind of switch up the 60 and the 30. This is going to give you a really nice, fresh take on your home without changing your interior design style. I also always notice that people pretty much have the same color palette all throughout their home. They just have different kind of arrangements of the 60-30-10 rule. So what you can do is you can just shop things in your bedroom or bring them out to the living room and switch it around. I'm telling you, seeing the same items in new parts of the home feels like you've bought something new. Trust and believe this is going to give you a totally fresh take without spending tons of money. But again, you can just add a new color. This is something I especially like to do seasonally. So maybe in the wintertime, I might add a hunter green in the fall. I might add a burgundy in the spring. This is where I might want to use an olive green or sage green or a pink or something like that. Maybe even a blue. It's a little bit more seasonally appropriate and it just totally shifts the vibe of the home. The next hack that you're going to do to make your home feel more expensive without spending too much money and without buying any new furniture is to look at your floors. So I like to think of floors as the sixth wall. So in interior design, we have the four walls, right? The four walls that you see around you. You have the fifth wall, which is the ceiling. And then in my opinion, you have the sixth wall, which is the floor. And the floors often get neglected. We don't think about the floors in terms of design. They just are an afterthought. But flooring is so powerful. So floors actually play a huge role in how light is dispersed in your space because floors are reflective. Even if your floor is on tile, they are reflective to an extent and they bounce light off them and they kind of interplay with the other things in your home. Your floors also have an undertone and that undertone impacts the perception of your space. So your floors are really, really powerful in your interior design process. Just think about how frustrating it was maybe when you had like obnoxious gray wood floors and you're like, oh, I have no idea how I'm going to make this space work because of these floors. That's how important flooring is. So one of the hacks you can do is to just restore the reflectivity of your floors. Get all of that grime and debris off of your floors. Floors are so high traffic. Even if you don't wear shoes in your home, it's so easy to get your floors dirty. And sometimes we cannot appreciate the true finish, the true coloring, the true undertones of a floor because we just haven't cleaned it super well. To clean my floors, I like to use the Shark Steam Spot that I picked up from QVC. And I do want to say huge thanks again to QVC for sponsoring today's video. The Shark Steam Spot is really amazing because it is a steam cleaner. So basically it uses really high temperature water to clean your floors and it is safe on sealed flooring. So if you have sealed hardwood, if you have sealed vinyl, tile, it is safe on sealed surfaces. It just is so powerful that it gets all of those layers of grime off that like the standard mop would not get. I also love that with the Shark Steam Spot, you are able to clean without any harsh chemicals. As a new mom, I'm so worried about chemicals. So I love just being able to use heat and steam to get my floors really nice and clean. And honestly, I find that cleaning products leave a residue on the floor that doesn't happen with the Shark Steam Spot. And therefore, we don't have that residue interfering with seeing the undertones, the finish and all that good stuff that we're talking about in today's video. QVC is one of the best places to pick up cleaning products this spring, and I urge you to go check them out. QVC personally is one of my go to places for affordable, high quality products in all of the different categories. Whether we're talking about home decor, outdoor furniture, jewelry, clothing, they have it all. QVC also has exclusive deals and exclusive offers that are not available anywhere else. So you're always going to get something fresh when you're shopping on qvc.com. QVC also offers flexible payment plans and their website is full of trustworthy reviews. Something about having high quality reviews, it makes me feel so much more confident in my purchases. Speaking of being confident in your purchases, I also love checking out QVC's YouTube channel. On their channel, they have tons of behind the scenes content and product demos so you can really learn about products before you purchase them so that you can feel confident in your purchases. So if you're looking to update your cleaning routine this spring, you want to pick up the Shark Steam Spot, I encourage you to go to qvc.com and click the link down in my description box. And again, if you're looking to update your wardrobe, your outdoor space, your jewelry, your kitchen this spring, QVC is the place to go. To shop the Shark Steam Spot and any other QVC product, click the link down in my description box and shop qvc.com. So now that we've improved the relationship between the lighting and the floors, we need to talk about lighting overall. So hack number four is to just take a look at your light bulbs. Now I'm not going to go on my soapbox about the temperature of your light bulbs for once, so I'm going to spare you of that today. But I do want you to dust your light bulbs. I cannot tell you how much dust and debris ends up on light bulbs, especially ones that are in the kitchen. They get so dirty, they get so grimy, and it's preventing them from giving off appropriate light. I know it doesn't seem like a huge deal, but it is a huge deal. More importantly, you should be switching out your light bulbs before they go out. This is something that I notice in my entry all the time. I'm like, oh, like my lights are fine, and then I will switch out a light bulb because maybe one goes out, and I'm like, whoa, it is actually so bright. Switch out your light bulbs on a regular basis. Put like a reminder in your calendar that it automatically reminds you every three months or every six months. Light bulbs need to be refreshed, and just getting a new light bulb, it doesn't have to be smart or anything like that, can totally change the lighting in your home. Of course, luxurious homes have warm lighting. That's really, really nice. But luxurious homes are also well lit. They are lit well enough for you to see what it is that you need to do, and of course, you can dim the lights. So that's like another level of luxury. You can get dimmable light bulbs, but being able to see first and foremost is a luxury, so you want to make sure you're paying attention to that. Another easy, relatively low-cost upgrade you can make to make your home look and feel a little bit more elevated this spring is to add sconces. Sconces are an interior design secret weapon because they illuminate, they direct your attention, and they serve as wall decor. They're doing three things at once, making them a really affordable option for us. Sconces can shoot light upwards and downwards. The light in and of itself becomes a form of artwork. It's just a great way to make your home look luxurious, and we just talked about using our overhead lighting, which is very, very important, but pretty much at 6 p.m. when it's time to wind down, we don't want to rely as heavily on our overhead lighting, and we want to rely a little bit more on our accent lighting, our background lighting, our relaxing lighting, and sconces are a really great tool for that. I sometimes find that sconces are so powerful artistically that you don't need artwork, so they tend to be a lot more affordable, especially if you're using a battery-operated kind or USB rechargeable kind, and they're going to cost you between maybe like $30 and $100, whereas artwork for an entire hallway can cost you almost $1,000 for all of the different pieces that you would need, plus the lighting that you need to really elevate that artwork, so I really think that this is kind of like a designer hack that you definitely want to try. Now, this is probably the easiest hack in today's video, so if you're feeling a little bit nervous, start with this one. I want you to add different botanicals to every high-traffic room in your home. Of course, you don't need botanicals in every single room in your home. That can get really, really costly, but I think adding botanicals makes your home feel alive. Every home needs an organic element, even if that organic element is faux. I think it adds a fresh scent. It helps your air actually be clean, if obviously the plants are real, and it just adds a pop of color in a way that doesn't ever feel discordant, even if that color isn't in like your traditional color palette, and I like to mix them up. The kitchen, to me, screams tulip. It screams hydrangea. It screams kind of spring. In the bedroom, I might have a faux tree, maybe something olive, something a little bit moodier. I like to do something different in every room just so that you have a fresh experience and a different pop of color in every room. I also just find that this is what luxurious homes always have. Whenever you see a luxury home, there's always a new fresh floral or a new bouquet or something like that. We don't need to do that. That's really, really costly. I say lean on faux and just vary them throughout your home and then cycle them throughout your home. Maybe this week, you have hydrangea on the kitchen counter and you have tulips in the bedroom, and then you just swap them around, and it's just going to give you a fresh experience in every room. Again, it's just going to give you that nice little organic element that just feels jovial. It feels bright. It feels airy, and I really love that, especially in the spring. And last but certainly not least, I want to share this hack, which is what I talk about all the time, but I want you to break up those matching sets. Whether you have a matching furniture set, whether you have a matching vase set, whether you even have a matching art set, I want you to break them up. In an ideal world, I want you to have one matching set per room. Matching sets are a really great way to affordably acquire artwork, furniture, things like that. I don't think you should stop buying them, but I think you should experiment with usage and experiment with where you put those items in the home. Again, we're following the 60-30-10 rule. We have a uniform design style throughout our home, so it's really easy to mix and match items if we're doing what we're supposed to be doing in terms of interior design. Separate those sets. We can appreciate the vignettes more, and the space just feels a little bit less repetitive, and it feels like you've done a little bit more work to elevate your space. And don't forget to get creative with the uses. A vase out here might be a vase for flowers, and a vase in the bathroom might be a toothbrush holder. And the vase in the kitchen might be for your cooking utensils. An ottoman out in the living room might be just a general space filler. And the entry would be a great way to take off your shoes when you come in and out of the house. An ottoman in your bedroom is a great way to stop the covers from falling onto the floor. An accent chair. This is something I love to do with clients. They recently did this in their space. They had these set of two chairs that were really expensive, so they didn't want to part with them, but they didn't really work with the new style. We put one in an office and one to create a sitting room in the bedroom, and they just work so much better separately because it's not kind of forcing the design style of that chair upon you. It's just kind of picking up all of the other things that we've kind of infused in those rooms that we've designed. But okay, you guys, those are a few hacks on how to make your home feel high-end without having to buy a new furniture. Again, it's about fixing and hacking what you already have, not always buying something new. Let me know which hack in today's video you're going to be trying ASAP. And if you're doing some spring cleaning and you want to get your home in order, I recommend picking up the Shark Steam Spot. I've linked it down in my description box, and it's a great opportunity to pick up the Shark Steam Spot and shop all of the exclusive deals on qvc.com. Thank you so much for watching today's video, and until next time, have a beautiful day. Bye-bye.